Between Barth and Heidegger: Michael Wyschogrod's The Body of Faith

This article offers a critical examination of the role of Martin Heidegger's philosophy in Michael Wyschogrod's most important work, Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, and explores its intersection with this work's more acknowledged debt to Karl Barth's theology. It explores the uses of these two key intellectual sources for Body of Faith and reflects on how this illuminates some of the basic assumptions, motivations and also shortcomings of Wyschogrod's Jewish theology. It demonstrates that Wyschogrod follows Barth in his decisive emphasis on divine revelation and in his turn to the biblical text as revelation's primary document, but what he finds there and claims to be authentic Jewish biblical thought betrays the mark of Heidegger. At the same time, Heidegger also serves as Wyschogrod's main foil, the emblem of the philosophical tradition that should be superseded by a Barthian- Jewish theology.